Media Buying Briefing: The latest lures holding companies are using to grow principal media

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Media Buying Briefing: The latest lures holding companies are using to grow principal media

This Media Buying Briefing covers the latest in agency news and media buying for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Monday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →

Principal media once again finds itself in headlines, at least in Digiday. That’s because it seems the agency holding companies are throwing any and everything they have at it to try to grow that side of the business. Several stories in Digiday last week point to this, and consultants that connect marketers to agencies are hearing and seeing the same.

Part of the reason is that, as holding companies rush to equip themselves with all manner of bristling AI tools and services, they still haven’t quite figured out how to sell them. And meantime, principal media has become a major source of profit margin. Problem, meet solution.

“One of the challenges with the agencies right now is that they don’t know how to price and sell their technology,” said Cyd Falkson, svp of strategic accounts at consultancy MediaSense. “And two, they have not done a good enough job explaining to clients — and then proving the value to clients at scale — from those services.”

What we know is that holdcos keep expanding ways to talk marketers into using principal media — the latest lure being AI services. As another consultant who spoke on condition of anonymity put it: ”I had heard very specifically recently, from somebody about how they were being pitched by a holding company on getting free AI tokenization if they signed up for the whole shooting match, which includes principal buying and one of their data services,” said the consultant.

Even Omnicom CEO John Wren admitted as much about AI at least, in his comments to analysts during the holdco’s most recent earnings announcement last week.

It’s all the holding companies, said Falkson. “All of them are looking to how they can expand and grow margin and revenue from principal media and how they can continue to better develop their AI, technology and data and get clients to adopt it and figure out how to make money from it,” she added.

“If we’re seeing these things happening now, it’s not a blip, it’s a systemic shift,” added Tom Denford, CEO and co-founder of consultancy ID Comms.

WPP, Omnicom and Publicis shed only a little light on the degree of investment in principal: in its first-half 2026 earnings, Omnicom’s “third party service costs” surged to almost $2.9 billion, up from $1.7 billion in H1 2025 — the footnote attached to that number reads “Third-party service costs include third-party supplier costs when we act as principal in providing services to our clients.”

Falkson said she’s 100% sure that offering these services at discounts or for free is to stoke the principal media machine. After all, the holding companies have found a high-margin growth business in buying ad inventory on the cheap and selling it at usually undisclosed markup to their clients, arguing it’s still less than said clients would pay in the open market. And their margins have been whittled down over the years by procurement.

To be fair, there are two sides to the issue — most of the agency world is against the practice of using principal media. They argue an agency is no longer an agent if it’s buyer and seller. And the main principal media practitioners aren’t exactly out in the open about it.

“One of the things that a lot of the indie agencies have been fighting with is that they’ll go into a media pitch against a holdco, and the holdco will almost give the media away for free, or seemingly for free, if they get a certain percentage of principal, and if they get an X number year contract for the data through their data offering,” said the consultant. “Some marketers will do that because not all CFOs and sourcing groups are equipped to figure out that they still may be getting hosed that way.”

The holding companies refuse to talk about this topic, no matter how many times they’re asked. And in some cases, they even downplay the practice — looking at you, Arthur Sadoun (analysts and consultants agree that Publicis is the largest and most successful purveyor of principal). But the truth is, many of the agencies opposed to it simply aren’t big enough to leverage principal media at the same scale the holdcos possess. There may be a sprinkling of envy mixed in with the righteous indignation.

Some marketers, especially the giants of their industry, go along with this because they largely buy into the argument that savings have been achieved — even if the holding company is making even more money off them. And CMOs these days are more eager than ever before to show their media spend is being used judiciously.

That said, Falkson noted that not every marketer goes into principal media as willingly as it would appear, given how fast it’s growing. “If you ask any client, do you want transparency? The answer would be yes,” she said, something principal media isn’t known for. “So you have to start from a place of no one wants to have a black box. And then you have to consider, okay, well, what are the other competing market realities? If everyone is engaging in it, and I don’t, what does that mean for me?”

Ultimately, it means a Hobson’s choice for many marketers working with holdcos. And for the holdcos, the use of quid-pro-quo services could spell an opportunity to get other tech offerings up and running while making a profit on principal media. So long as there is clarity around the degree of transparency going into it.

“We advise clients to definitely make sure that their position is explicit going into any review, because we know that it is such a large component of the commercial model,” said Falkson. “What we don’t want to have happen is for an agency to make an assumption that a client would engage in this, and then think about that as they think about the total commercial model. Because agencies may offer services and trade for participation — what we don’t want to have is a misunderstanding, which puts the agency in a bad position, or that a client might want to engage in something and sign up for a commitment and then not get a benefit.” —Sam Bradley contributed to this story.

Color by numbers

Holding company earnings continued to trickle out last week. Faring best was Stagwell, which saw revenue grow 10%, and grew organic revenue 8%. Stagwell’s digital transformation unit, which includes the Code and Theory Network, enjoyed the most organic growth at 12%, which Stagwell CEO Mark Penn attributed to marketers looking to delve deeper into AI in one form or another.

Omnicom’s total revenue grew 66% in first half — mostly because revenue in 2025 didn’t include IPG yet — and margins improved to 15.5%. CEO John Wren in his comments said organic growth was around 6% from core operations (Omnicom is in the process of selling off non-core assets — see Direct quote for more detail on that).

ServicePlan, which owns the MediaPlus network, released its full-year results, seeing revenue grow 2.7%. (WPP will release its H1 earnings on Aug. 6 and Dentsu will report its H1 earnings on Aug. 14.)

Takeoff & landing

• Editor’s note: an earlier item incorrectly stated that Gap had put its media in review — it has not.
• Nielsen launched Ad Intel AI, an AI-powered platform that transforms fragmented advertising data into what it called real-time, actionable media intelligence that focuses on competitor strategy, spend, creative and market opportunities.
• Independent social agency Saylor launched Fleet, an internal creator studio for brands to build creator partnerships and develop original content formats.
• Account moves: Omnicom’s OMD won Australian airline Qantas Group’s media business for all Asia after a review … And OMD sibling UM won White Claw parent Mark Anthony Brands’ media business following a review, with Haworth losing the business … Tinuiti secured media AOR duties for beauty brand Allies of Skin … British indie agency Medialab extended its relationship with Alzheimer’s Society.

Direct quote

“Dispositions in the second half [for Omnicom] will shave off additional revenue so that by year-end approximately $3.5 billion of revenue will be lost … The margins on the divested businesses are roughly 10%, so the dispositions are boosting margins too.” — Dave Novosel, senior bond analyst at Gimme Credit, on Omnicom’s H1 earnings.

Speed reading

• In his latest Future of TV Briefing, Tim Peterson reports that Comcast-owned ad tech firm FreeWheel is rolling out show-level reporting for advertisers using its ad buying platform Buyer Cloud.
• Alyssa Mercante and Kimeko McCoy dug into the details behind the numbers around Unilever’s move to employ up to 300,000 creators as a centerpiece of its marketing efforts.
• Krystal Scanlon continues to cover every one of OpenAI’s moves into the ad business, the latest being its couponing phase, as it hands advertisers credits to get them spending more, testing budgets, and building habits on the platform.

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